Entertainment

Why Recognizing Your Employees on Social Media Is Great for Business

Curt Finch is the founder and CEO of Journyx, a company that offers time-tracking and resource management software. Connect with him and Journyx on Facebook and Twitter.

Social media has opened countless new avenues for promotion of all kinds. As a result of blogs, Twitter, Facebook and more, it’s as if we all have access to a bullhorn, and thus, the ability to promote ourselves whenever and to whomever we choose.

Within your company, surely you’ve grappled with the use, disuse and even misuse of social media. But have you thought about using it for employee recognition? Communicate your staff appreciation by employing social media as a positive acknowledgement tool. It's a highly visible and yet low-cost way to show your support.

They found that the three most important reasons small businesses leverage social media are:

To connect with customers.

To increase visibility.

To self-promote.

It's time to add employee appreciation to the mix.

Employee Recognition Reflects Well On Your Company

Publicly recognizing your employees’ accomplishments also shines a positive light on your company. For example, a Best Western hotel used social media to highlight one of its top employees, Wallace Pope, who was nominated to receive a “Stars of the Industry” award from the Illinois Hotel and Lodging Association. To help Wallace’s campaign, his employer created a Facebook Page and asked guests of its downtown Chicago hotel to visit the page and share their experiences and thoughts as to why Wallace should receive this award.

Guests flocked to the page and posted stories about Wallace's helpfulness during their stays. They had also been interacting with Wallace virtually through his Best Western River North Hotel blog called “Where’s Wallace?” No doubt the Facebook page with all the customer testimonials helped influence the judging process. Plus, it was great advertising for the hotel itself.

Boost Company Morale In Real-Time

The reason why social media is so ideal for employee recognition is not because it’s free (although that certainly doesn’t hurt); it’s because many, if not all, of your employees are already on social networks. Recognizing your employees where they already “hang out” has a more meaningful effect. Keep in mind that the average age of Facebook users is 38, for Twitter is 39, and for LinkedIn is 44. So don’t use the youth excuse!

Recognition through social media helps executives reach their employees. It also encourages peer-to-peer acknowledgement: friends leave comments, retweet and continue to share news. Whether publicly through popular social media platforms or privately through internal networking sites, sincerely acknowledging your employees through social media is an incredibly effective tool to reward your staff and boost company morale.

What Are the Best Ways to Recognize Employees on Social Media?

So, how do you go about recognizing your business' top performers? Here are some tips.

Facebook: Facebook is such a personal medium that highlighting employee accomplishments will not only boost the morale of the employee; it will also spice up a corporate Facebook page. Include pictures (of, say, the employee receiving an award) and tag employees so that recognition can spread beyond the company to that person's friends and family.

Yammer: If you have concerns about keeping company data private, try an internal social network designed specifically for business, like Yammer. Yammer's password-protected site provides a Facebook-like networking forum — a great space to recognize employees.

Rypple: Rypple is specifically built for recognition. The internal social management platform enables managers/people within a company to instantly recognize and reward one another for doing great work.

Twitter: Twitter is great for shout-outs to top-performing employees. Make sure to @tag the employee so it shows up in her Twitter feed. You could also create a hashtag for all employee recognition tweets so that Twitter groups them together for easy search.

The company blog: This is a perfect place to highlight the accomplishments of an individual employee or an amazing team. Blogs lend themselves to detailed descriptions, lists and pictures and allow anyone to comment on the blog post or add to the conversation.

Virtual gifts: A relatively new phenomenon in social media is the idea of giving virtual gifts. Use KangoGift to send small, digital gifts to an employee's cellphone; the gifts can then be redeemed inside a store or restaurant. Extend the idea by creating an organized employee recognition program, and sharing these types of informal gifts on a regular basis.

One Word of Caution

Before you fire off that tweet, do remember that not everyone loves the limelight. “Be careful to reward people in any sort of public forum unless you're absolutely certain that they would welcome that kind of attention,” warns Linda Pophal of Strategic Communications, LLC. “A number of years ago I supervised a graphic designer who was going to be recognized at an ‘all-employee’ meeting. She got wind of it and came to my office extremely agitated because she did not want that kind of public attention. Social media is just another form of public exposure - on steroids. Yes, it can be a good thing, but it can also backfire.”

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